14
The snow came, transforming all that it touched, as if even nature wished to erase the bloody events at the Cane cabin. The massacre had cast a funereal pall over all, even as the snow in all its bright and silent beauty encased the pickets in ice and turned the river to silver.
Lael longed for Pa’s return, her angst tinged with boredom and disbelief at what had befallen the settlement. With the Canes killed, the schoolhouse closed and all manner of people crowded into the fort, some families living two to a cabin, lest their fate be the same.
With so many people present, Ma Horn was never idle. Though her abode was even smaller than her cabin atop Pigeon Ridge, she crammed each corner and crevice with healing herbs. As winter set in, the grippe seemed to visit every family, and even Lael herself took to bed with a fever, burning up and shivering by turns beneath a Star of Bethlehem quilt. Ma Horn poured all manner of tea and tincture down her, and on the fourth day she arose, ready to resume her chores.
As she stood over a log trough full of rainwater under the cabin’s eave, stirring in wood ashes to make washing suds, there came a commotion at the front gate.
Two men hobbled past the sentry and stood just within the fort’s walls. Within minutes a crowd began to gather and frightful weeping could be heard. Lael hung back even as Ma pressed forward. Though hardly recognizable after more than six years away, two more men taken captive with her father at the salt licks had finally come home.
Strange, Lael thought, how the Click clan could never seem to get shed of the past and all its secrets. Standing at the back of the crowd, she saw nothing familiar about the half-starved, barely clothed men before her, their bare feet scalded from walking the many miles from the British stronghold of Detroit.
Because the men’s families had long since given them up for dead and returned east, they were now without kin or cabin. It was Ma Horn who took them in, burning their louse-ridden clothes and cutting their long hair before doing so. Once they’d shaved and bathed, Ma brought a tray of stew, bread, and cider to their door. But the men demanded whiskey and a meeting with Pa and the fort’s leaders, most of whom were away scouting and hunting.
Ma Horn plied the men’s frazzled forms with moonshine and tinctures and kept them to their beds, allowing them but one or two visitors at a time. Weak and sickly though they were, Hugh McClary and John Watson were a huge curiosity, drawing every last man to the tiny cabin to rehash the events of the last six years.
“Let them talk. ’Tis a tonic in itself,” the old woman said.
But Lael sensed trouble. Within days of their return, as Ezekial’s name grew more muddied, there was renewed talk of renaming the fort. Hugh McClary spoke out most strongly in favor of the notion.
Ma snorted when she heard the news. “I suppose he’s callin’ it Fort McClary already,” she retorted bitterly before returning to her spinning.
Now, years after the fact, Pa’s name was again being tied to treason. Long forgotten was his court-martial and subsequent exoneration. Yet McClary refused to let the past rest. No one truly knew what happened at the salt licks all those years before, he argued. Who was to say even now that the absent Click wasn’t out working with the Indians and British to bring about their doom?
Lael could hear him loud and clear in the evenings as they shared an end wall with Ma Horn’s cabin. When others came to visit the two recuperating captives, raised voices could be heard through the log wall. Though Ma said nothing, Lael could not stand the idle chatter. Yet where could she go except to stand out in the snow?
The fort seemed to churn and foment in Pa’s absence. Though McClary and Watson made plans to return to their families in Pennsylvania, they were far from well and could not travel. As long as McClary remained, his ill will permeated and poisoned the fort. Lael had long watched her father outwit the smartest men and smooth all manner of ruffled feathers. Their present predicament begged for a cool head and restraining hand.
Oh Pa, come home, wherever you are.
Lael knocked then pushed open the door of Ma Horn’s, careful not to upset the heavy tray she carried. With Ma abed with the grippe, it fell to Lael to fix supper for the invalid men and serve it, and tonight Ma Horn was nowhere to be seen.
From the shadows Hugh McClary stared at her, his emaciated face more skeleton than whiskers. John Watson nodded her way in friendly fashion, then looked away as if embarrassed to be seen in his bed clothes.
“Ain’t you Zeke Click’s daughter?” McClary said. “You look some like him.”
“Leave her be,” Watson warned from his bed.
The smell of sickness and herbs hung about the room. Lael remembered someone saying McClary had lung fever and the French pox. Ma had blushed scarlet at this, though Lael didn’t know what it meant. Maybe the sickness made him mean. Carefully, she approached the table and set down the tray. The aroma of hot hominy and pork gravy made her mouth water.
“I ain’t eatin’ nothin’ from the hand o’ no traitor,” McClary continued, thrashing on his pallet.
“She ain’t no traitor, you idiot! Her pa saved your hide at the salt licks,” Watson said, struggling to sit up.
“That Injun lover! He saved hisself, turnin’ Shawnee while we sat rottin’ in some British prison six years. I’m surprised he come back here after fallin’ in with Chief Blackfish. All that talk about bein’ adopted turns my stomach.”
“The talk’s true,” Watson said, breaking into a sweat from the sheer exertion of sitting up.
“I’ll tell you what’s true . . .”
Lael began backing up toward the door. Where was Ma Horn?
“The truth is there’s more than one blue-eyed Injun brat beyond the Falls of the Ohio where Zeke Click’s concerned.”
Lael turned and fled the cabin, leaving the door wide open in her wake. The cold night air assaulted her senses as she ran through crusty snow, stopping just inside the stockade where she hid in a dark corner. Sliding down against the frozen pickets, she buried her face in her apron, but no tears came. Truly, she was beyond tears. Her small world, made up primarily of her pa and unsettled as it was, seemed to unravel fast as twine.
She knew what McClary meant. Just lately she’d begun to wonder herself. While Ma dallied with Uncle Neddy, did Pa not do the same in the Indian villages? Had Chief Blackfish not only adopted him as a son but presented him with an Indian bride? Two years was a long time to be away. Had he fathered other children besides her? “Blue-eyed brats,” McClary had called them. If so, how did he know, imprisoned as he’d been in Detroit?
’Twould not be a bad life, Daughter.
Suddenly Pa’s words took on new meaning. Perhaps he’d found the Indian life very good indeed.
15
The snow continued, turning the fort to ice. Even Ransom grew restless, tired of playing on the cold common.
“Ain’t Pa ever gonna come back?” he asked.
“Soon,” Lael reassured him, beginning to wonder herself. She had a fierce hankering to see Susanna in her new home and hear if the rumors about her expecting a baby were true. Mostly she longed to escape fort walls, for her run-in with Hugh McClary dogged her like a black shadow.
Even Ma seemed to sense her restlessness. “Now’s as good a time as any to teach you how to spin flax,” she said, “since you’re done knitting those socks for Simon and your pa.”
“I’m no good at spinning, Ma,” she lamented. She took up another hank of yarn and remembered what Ransom had overheard hanging around the blacksmith’s shop. Simon was up on his four hundred again, and she’d heard that with the help of Neddy, his nearest neighbor, he was at work building a cabin.
Their cabin.
Come spring, would she be there? Come spring, what would he say to Pa?
But spring seemed years away. With the Canes buried but two weeks and Piper in seclusion in the Hayes’ blockhouse, time seemed to stand still, frozen into place by snow and the sameness of fort life. Even McClary’s unending chatter seemed grou
nd down by fatigue. Not so many men came by Ma Horn’s cabin these days.
“I’d be obliged if you’d help me make some shoepacs,” Lael told her ma once she’d stopped her spinning.
Using strips of sturdy whang leather, they sewed high tops onto her moccasins and lined them with otter fur, creating snug shoepacs. Next she knitted herself stockings, and Ma made her a large linsey shawl, which she folded into a triangle and draped around her shoulders for warmth. A shapeless fur hat made from beaver pelts replaced her limp summer bonnet. At last, in a heavy dress dyed butternut brown, she could face the cold as often as she pleased.
But there was nowhere to go beyond the fort’s four walls. Fear kept them all inside, the fate of the Canes an ugly reminder of what likely awaited any who wandered.
Was this how Pa felt within the crowded, fetid fort that bore his name? There seemed no greater punishment, Lael reckoned, than to be confined to the company of a passel of people crammed together in close quarters. As each day dawned and ebbed, she longed for wide open spaces where she could draw an easy breath, but fear kept the fort gates locked tight.
Standing along a high wall, peering out a gun hole toward the frozen river, its surface a gunmetal gray, she pondered the fear that had shadowed her for fourteen years, just as it had most who’d ventured over the Cumberland into Kentucke. She wondered if it would dog her all her days. If Pa wrestled with fear, she never knew it. Perhaps that was why his name was chiseled above the front gates. Even the Indians made no secret of their admiration for him. Indeed, their respect ran so deep it extended to her, a cowardly, would-be woman.
Pa would not trade freedom for fear, so why should she? Her father’s blood ran in her veins. Might hers not contain a bit of boldness besides? Would she one day look back and regret a life of stepping carefully? Was it not a form of slavery?
Aye, she would rather die than sit here another day.
Quietly, so furtively as to be almost Indian-like, she unhobbled Pride and led him to the fort’s back gates. The sentry on watch simply stared at her.
“Please open the gate, sir. I wish to pass.”
She didn’t know his name, but he knew hers. Behind his brushy beard his brogue was thick with Ireland. “Miss Click, what would your father be sayin’ to that?”
She nearly smiled. “I think he’d ask what took me so long.”
For a fleeting moment she thought he would deny her. Then turning a wary eye past his post, he unbarred the massive gates and cracked them just enough to let her pass. Thanking him, she got up on Pride’s bare back, her fingers embedded in his thick mane, and rode out.
When the gates thudded shut behind her and the bolt slid into place, she had but one fleeting moment of terror. Dawn painted the sky with sepia light. She wanted no onlookers on this, her first foray into newfound freedom.
Heading east, she followed the sun. Pride seemed as exhilarated as she, kicking up snow and snorting wildly. Once she lost her shawl and went back for it, knotting it so that it would stay put about her shoulders. Strangely, she wasn’t cold. Beneath her fur hat, one plump straw-colored plait hung down her back to the horse’s belly.
Soon she stood in a clearing. A blackened cabin and a once proud cornfield had been reduced to soot and stubble, as if a great unruly beast had stomped the cabin and crushed it, then gobbled up the corn with a fiery breath. Only the chimney of gray river rock remained. All around her the grass was still scorched save for a gentle rise to the west where a stately maple shaded seven mounds of earth and rock. Gravesites. This was the work of the Shawnee.
At Cozy Creek she took some parched corn from her pocket, her fingers pausing to caress the blue beads. As she ate, she moved out of the dark woods into a clearing where the sun worked to thaw the winter ground. A joree bird wintering in the valley called to her. To-wee . . . to-wee. She whistled back, a shrill sound in the stillness.
As she rode she scarcely passed a single cabin belching smoke. Their own sat silent and shivering against the snowy ridge, giving her a twinge of homesickness. Some folks, like Uncle Neddy, stayed put in times of trouble, but most fled to the fort. She crested Hackberry Ridge and reluctantly rode down to the fort in time to help with supper.
“Mush again?” Ransom whined.
She served him anyway, weary of the sight herself. When would Pa return with fresh meat? Their store of salt was dwindling and she feared she was about to go stockade-crazy.
Swallowing a sigh, she removed the kettle from the fire and poured two cups of black bohea. Poking around in the cupboard produced no long-sweetening, and so they were left to choke down the bitter brew plain. The cabin was all too still. Ma had been quiet all evening and had not resumed her spinning, and Lael missed the familiar whirr of the wheel. She was prepared for some protest about her wandering beyond fort walls, and so it didn’t surprise her when her mother started in.
“I wondered how long it would be before you went the way of your father.” There was weary resignation in her words and a kind of bewilderment in her eyes. “Nothing on earth could tempt me beyond these walls, yet you seem drawn to it. I can’t stop your wanderin’, but I wonder what I’ll tell your pa when you don’t come back.”
“Tell him you just can’t pin a Click down,” Lael answered matter-of-factly, though she felt sudden sympathy for her mother sitting there hunkered down, so small and weary and worn. Was this what fear did?
As for herself, she felt alive, renewed, about to leap out of her chair. Tomorrow beckoned, promising untold pleasures and wonders.
Where would she go?
Oh, but it was a fine thing to be free. Standing atop Moccasin Knob, where eagles soared, the world was at her feet. Throwing her arms wide, Lael twirled around atop the knob like a toy top, spinning and whirling until dizziness slowed her. The snow had melted and the sun, as if emboldened by her antics, shone forth in a cloudless sky.
Heading west, she traversed Log Lick Trace, soon walking on unfamiliar ground, the going a muddy mess what with the sudden thaw. She could make more than twenty miles in a day on rough ground but knew Pa could go farther. She imagined meeting up with him and fancied seeing surprise and admiration in his keen blue eyes. But never anger.
The clear day beckoned her on, made her bold. At last she came to Muddy Creek, a place she’d been warned away from her whole life. Indian sign was nearly always to be found there. A crude cross on a low rise marked the site, a silent reminder of the massacre three years past that befell a party of settlers who had pushed too far into Indian territory.
Pausing with the sun at her back, she studied the scene and said a quick prayer for peace. Not six steps later she came across the first Indian sign. Instead of fleeing, she followed it clear to the mouth of the Red River where the footprints ended.
Retreating, she fairly ran back to the fort, dusk at her heels.
No longer did the sentries look long after her and shake their heads. She smiled at the stir she’d created. Wasn’t it a wonderment, some said, how Lael Click could wander unmolested in the very woods where they themselves would likely be hacked to pieces? Aye, the legend of her father seemed even to follow her.
16
Common sense told Lael it was time she began carrying a gun on her forays. Gathering the ginseng money she’d saved, she went to the fort sutler and exchanged her shillings for a flintlock rifle and a good supply of powder and shot. Ransom looked on with awe, as the rifle was taller than he.
For once Lael was glad the good Lord had made her a tall woman. The rifle was lighter than Pa’s own, the stock made of hard maple and blackened with soot. Best yet, she could ready it for immediate use, though learning to load it in good time proved a challenge. She’d watched Pa countless times measure a charge from his powder horn into the muzzle, then ramrod the bullet to the bottom of the bore. She recollected how easily he primed the lock with a little powder before closing the pan cover and cocking the lock, readying it in under a minute. He was the only man she knew who could reload on
the run.
“I bet you can’t shoot that thing,” Ransom said sleepily, watching her from the loft.
The cabin was quiet save the two of them. Ma had gone visiting and now, left to themselves, they could say what they pleased.
“Pa showed me how when I turned twelve,” she said. “But I’ve hardly fired one.”
“I heard tell Jane McFee can stand up to a gun hole good as any man.”
“You heard right.” Truly, Jane McFee, now approaching sixty, had a man’s hand with a gun. Lael longed to be like her, though she didn’t know if she could shoot to kill.
“I reckon you could pick off a painter pretty quick.” Ransom scratched his head as if thinking. “Maybe a bear too.”
She took up a rag and began polishing the stock. An animal was the least of her concerns, but she didn’t say so.
Ransom rambled on. “You see Simon? He come in just today, but you was gone. He disbelieved me when I told him you were on one of your rambles.”
Simon? Here? Getting up, she stepped to the shutter and looked across the common to the Hayes’ blockhouse where a window was etched in yellow light. How did Simon and Piper Cane fare in the same cabin? she wondered. Piper hadn’t yet come out of seclusion. Ma Horn said she sat silent in a chair with nary a word to anyone. Lael pitied her plight. Would Simon amuse her, make her laugh? No matter. Simon was safe within fort walls, and she’d no doubt see him come morning.
At dawn the militia drilled then took a brief rest before again picking up their guns. A line of men snaked across the cold common, each bearing a rifle. At the end of the line stood Lael, at first merely curious about their marksmanship. She noted the various men, their different weapons and how each was handled. Simon, ahead of her, seemed oblivious to her presence.